Corsair releases its 256GB Solid-State Disk

Back in November, we wrote about Corsair’s announcement to begun
a mass production of 256GB
SSDs for notebooks and desktop PCs. The company had been analyzing the solid-state
market very closely a few months prior and had finally chosen to release its
first MLC NAND flash product in late January, the 2.5-inch 128GB model dubbed
S128.

Just a few months later, Corsair has just released its first
2.5-inch 256GB model based on 30nm Samsung MLC NAND flash. The new model,
dubbed P256, is a high-performance SSD capable of delivering read speeds of up
to 220MB/sec and write speeds of up to 200MB/sec. It is equipped with a
whopping 128MB of cache memory and features support for Native Command Queuing to
ensure that the drive has commands to process while the system is busy
processing CPU tasks.

“The Corsair Storage Solutions P256 delivers the best
computing experience of any single storage drive available today,” said John
Beekley, VP of Applications Engineering at Corsair, “Using the P256 results in
immediate and dramatic improvements in system startup and shutdown, game level
loading, application startup, and many other everyday tasks. Additionally, the
P256 is more durable and reliable than hard disk drives, and has been shown in
the Corsair Labs to provide up to 25% longer battery life in portable
computers.”

The Corsair P256 (CMFSSD-256GBG2D) is
backed by a two-year warranty and can be had for around $669
in the US and €556
in Europe respectively.